Just to be clear here, people climbing over embassy gates generally don't leave a smoking ruin behind them, nor do reports through the day come out about gunfire and explosives, nor do they kill people.

I didn't mean to insinuate that they weren't, but it wasn't clear the day this stuff went down, the footage was limited.

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If the administration believed that the incident was a terrorist organization, why was the UN debate two weeks later still talking about it?

I think there is a big difference between a bunch of people committing terrorism and terrorist organization doing their job. For the first several days, it wasn't even clear that it was a pre-meditated attack, and had nothing to do with the video. That may have backfired if the US administration came out the next day proclaiming it was a premeditated attack by the Taliban when the rest of the UN was discussing whether the video was even a factor.

Yes. Swishy. He didn't come out and say it was any particular terrorist organization or even that it was suspected to be islamists allied with certain terror groups. He said it was an 'act of terror'.

Sorry, but there's really nothing unambiguous about this. He said "acts of terror". DONE. I'm not saying the administration handled things flawlessly. I'm saying that Mitt Romney was wrong about what he said, and was looking for the political killshot in the wrong area. It wasn't about what he said, it was about what he did. But Romney chose to focus on the "acts of terror" TERM instead of the fact that the administration took forever to separate, at least in the eyes of the populace, the protesters and the terrorists.

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Who here is saying Fox News isn't pro-Romney and anti-Obama? I think we can all agree that all the news agencies have picked the horse they're backing, and have done so for years. Remember, it's not "news" anymore, it's merely "media", that way they can defend the shameless bias we constantly see in all these various outlets.

This might be the truth, but I don't think it should be accepted. I think that these organizations should be held accountable for their actions, just like I believe that the politicians running should be. Both candidates, and indeed, every news organization, distort the truth, and sometimes outright lie. My favorite line is Romney's claim that Obama doubled the deficit, when he's using figures in 2008 that don't include $700 billion in Bush administration spending. It's madness.

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but I think the real gaffe comes from Romney's "binder of women" line. Not because it didn't make sense, but because I'm really enjoying the memes from it.

Sorry, but I actually find this stuff unhelpful to political discourse. No, Romney wasn't exactly eloquent at that particular moment, but we should be talking about what he was actually saying, not how poorly he said it. Mitt Romney is not a friend of women's rights. He describes "not wanting to hire an all-male cabinet" and searching for women to fill these positions.

As a female American, let me tell you, I don't want any more opportunities than a male American. I don't want to get a job because Mitt Romney "wants to hire women". I simply want to be fairly judged against my competitors without gender being a question, and, yeah, I'd like to have my pay be based on my merits and not on my sex characteristics. Furthermore, his later explanation on women needing to be home to cook for their children and be home with them when they got home from school is downright offensive.

In my opinion, there are two tragedies of the 2012 elections: That my choice of candidates from major parties has been downright awful, and that Jill Stein was arrested for attempting to enter the debate. She's a presidential candidate with her name on 85% of ballots. She could theoretically win enough electoral votes to win the presidency, and yet, she's not allowed to enter the debate.

Edit: Also, I'd just like to take this time to raise awareness for the first Online Presidential Debate tomorrow (Thursday) night at 7 PM EST, where Dr. Jill Stein (Green Party) will debate Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party).

The organization that sets up the 'debates' was created not so long ago as a joint project by the Democrats and Republicans, so it's not hard to see why the format goes so easy on the candidates - or how and why they keep 3rd parties out.

Remember: it's not a conspiracy theory if none of the facts are disputed.

Sorry, but I actually find this stuff unhelpful to political discourse. No, Romney wasn't exactly eloquent at that particular moment, but we should be talking about what he was actually saying, not how poorly he said it. Mitt Romney is not a friend of women's rights. He describes "not wanting to hire an all-male cabinet" and searching for women to fill these positions.

Sorry, I didn't mean to insinuate that women's rights are not an important issue; they are. However, one of the things I've seen popping up as a result of Mitt's comment is some research done into his actual history of hiring women while Governing Massachusetts. It turns out that the number of women employed by the state of Massachusetts actually decreased while Romney is governor. So without those memes, I wouldn't have known a politically relevant fact. Do they muddy the discourse? Honestly, no more so than it is already muddied.

Yes. Swishy. He didn't come out and say it was any particular terrorist organization or even that it was suspected to be islamists allied with certain terror groups. He said it was an 'act of terror'.

He said that once, and then the political machine went into spin mode and they started talking about it being a movie review that got a little crazy for a few weeks after they initially made a general reference to "acts of terror" without referring to this specifically. Letterman, The View, UN, he blamed a video and not terrorism while talking to all of them.

How did you know the had AK-47s and RPGs? All the footage I saw, simply showed a bunch of people climbing over embassy gates, but I didn't see people with AK-47s and RPGs, otherwise, I don't think they'd really need to be climbing that gate en masse like that. How did you know they were islamists though? All that you could gather from armed civilians, is that they're armed civilians, that doesn't automatically connect them to islamists.

The President (other official title?) of Libya said it was a planned attack almost immediately. Long before Obama said it was a response to a youtube video on the View.

The President (other official title?) of Libya said it was a planned attack almost immediately. Long before Obama said it was a response to a youtube video on the View.

That is a good point, as I remember offhand the Libyan President making that statement, but perhaps he was doing that to avoid having America dropping the hammer of justice on Libya? Regardless it was more than official enough for the President to make it clear it was a planned attack immediately.

Or maybe he had better intel on what was going on *in his own country* than we did. And perhaps we decided not to just take his word for it because he obviously wasn't going to say "the people have spoken, we are at war over this film". International intelligence and diplomacy is never as clear cut as the opposition would paint it when talking about intelligence failures.

Actually if anything they are too invested in technological intelligence (communications monitoring and satelite surveilance) and not enough in building human intelligence networks. In a place like Libya I suspect the opposite configuration holds true. So if you post a fake protest to facebook while you meet clandestinely in large crowds to plan the actual attack, the CIA is helpless...